Contact center performance is often measured by at least two competing factors—customer satisfaction and agent efficiency. Customer satisfaction is often maximized if work items are assigned to the best agent possible, but wait times are minimized. Agent efficiency is often maximized if agents are regularly working rather than sitting idle.
It often occurs in contact center that a work item is routed to a less than optimal agent. In other words, many contact centers favor agent efficiency over customer satisfaction and, therefore, will assign contacts to an idle agent even if that agent is not the best-suited agent to process the work item. The logic behind making such a routing decision is that it is better to assign the work item to anyone sooner than to wait for the best agent.
Unfortunately, prior art contact centers would make such a routing decision and never reconsider whether such a decision was in the best interest of the contact center or whether the decision could be reversed based on a change in contact center conditions (e.g., the better agent becoming available just after assignment of the work item to the less than optimal agent). Thus, the window of opportunity for making intelligent work item routing decisions has traditionally been limited to the time between when a work item is received and when the work item is routed to an agent. After assignment to an agent, the work assignment logic is no longer concerned with the work item. While it may be possible for the originally-assigned agent to transfer or re-route the contact, this is often done without further input from the work assignment logic. Even if the agent places the work item back into a work item queue for re-routing by the work assignment logic, the same short-sighted assignment process will be executed.